Is China just another case of modern industrial development? It is tempting to talk about the country’s economic and social transformation in the context of “late industrialization” in the West Pacific. After all, China’s miraculous ascent to the summit of the manufactured goods trade over the last two decades was preceded by other growth “miracles.” Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (as well as some smaller southeast asian states) all seem to have created similar paths to export-led growth in which industrial policies created capital-intensive and high-tech manufacturing sectors that displaced their European and American competitors in global value chains. China could just be the latest, most spectacularly successful, “developmental state.”
This is plausible. But a few things sow doubt. One thing that stands out is the genuinely “hybrid” nature of China’s economy, where a one-party state socialism and a vast system of investment programs and subsidies enable hyper-intensive competition between firms and regions that drives both innovation and lower prices and costs. In other words, both the degree of capital coercion and the severity of consumer market forces distinguish it from its predecessors in the region.
The scale of development, too, is different. It cannot entirely be written off as a reflection of China’s natural endowments. For one, past a certain point quantity can become quality. A country’s large labor pool, for instance, can enable labor-intensive manufacturing and create economies in domestic markets before upgrading to capital- and skill-intensive sectors. But size doesn’t guarantee anything. India entered the 1980s with higher rates of urbanization but has since been left in the dust as its industrial development stalled and is now showing signs of prematurely reversing (Figure 1).
By contrast, China’s urbanization is arguably the single most dramatic process of material and social transformation of the postwar era. Over…
Auteur: Dominik A. Leusder
